Date: 11/3/2005

Gerry Cohen notices, in a comment on this blog, that Fred Stutzman and his work on Facebook are quoted in a Daily Tar Heel OpEd called “Danger, Danger.” The article is full of Facebook Fear warning students that pictures on the Internet can lead to unintended consequences. Fred was amused to be identified as “local resident” as in Research by Fred Stutzman, a local resident, indicates that more than 90 percent of UNC-Chapel Hill undergraduates have a Facebook account[.]

The web is having a birthday. This month, we will have the 15th anniversary of the creation of the first web page. It is the birthday of Tim Berners-Lee’s amazing idea that there could be a world wide web, linked not by spider silk but by hypertext links and transfer protocols and uniform resource locators.

How should we celebrate? We are too close to the web to understand it. And those who lost money in the dotcom boom greet any celebration of the web the way a person with a hangover greets a mention of the drink of which they overindulged. The knowledge of shameful excess produces a renunciant puritanism. No more tequila or web romanticism for me!

That is a shame, because there are three things that we need to understand about the web. First, it is more amazing than we think. Second, the conjunction of technologies that made the web successful was extremely unlikely. Third, we probably would not create it, or any technology like it, today. In fact, we would be more likely to cripple it, or declare it illegal.